Word: meaninglessness
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...predicted a peace agreement (if destined for the shelf, rather than implementation) by the end of 2008. Palestinian negotiators are now saying that without an agenda that includes Jerusalem, which Palestinians want to share and make the capital of a future Palestinian state, even the shelf-agreement talks are meaningless...
...there's no objective reality, really. Nabokov was writing in 1956, just before the film form called cinema verité proved that even truth-seeking documentaries could have a social agenda and decades before shows like The Real World, Survivor and Big Brother made "reality TV" a phrase that is meaningless without sarcasm. Today, with reality programs using scriptwriters and dramas going for that realistic shaky-cam vibe, the whole medium seems to be seeking a plausible fictional reality. Call it faux verit?...
...undertaking, except that the person formally ratifying the charter was Nyan Win, the Foreign Minister of Burma, a country with one of the world's most appalling human-rights records. Indeed, Burma's signing of the document during this year's ASEAN ministerial meeting in Singapore threatens to render meaningless the lofty humanitarian goals set by the organization's 10 member nations...
...trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC). When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the ICC, requested a warrant to arrest Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of genocide a week before the Karadzic arrest, he was widely slammed. Critics claimed the step was meaningless and that, far from deterring al-Bashir, it would only enrage and embolden him, making life even worse for the people of Darfur...
Inspectors did an abysmal job of examining the nation's aircraft operators. Countless required or recommended inspections were never conducted, while others were carried out so perfunctorily that they were meaningless, and still more revealed problems that went unreported just to spare the airlines any inconvenience. Inspections of planes, pilots, mechanics and repair stations were so unreliable as to be virtually useless. Fortunately, most of the time savvy and diligent airlines filled the gap. But it was inevitable that the inspection process would eventually break down at an airline like ValuJet, creating the perfect conditions for a deadly crash...